There's a whole lot of hyperbole and some theories verging on tinfoil hat conspiracy territory. In theory WOTC could shut someone down. There's no indication that they would unless someone was publishing something vile. In theory they could copy someone's work, but unless you mark your content as PI (which from my understanding is not simple and rarely done), they could have always copied it. Very little published under the OGL is marked as PI and other than a couple of monsters many years ago they've never directly copied anything. Ideas and concepts are copied by most TTRPGs all the time, of course which is why we have products like Strixhaven.
Dude, lawyers have looked at that section. Even the lawyers who did a hit piece of on Linda Codega agreed that that section you're describe was so legally messed up that in their legal opinion,
no-one should ever have signed the OGL 1.1. The wording was
not normal or okay, even if we believe the intention was fine.
So you coming here and saying "OH TINFOIL HATS THE LOT OF YOU!!!" is just silly at this point.
WotC themselves completely walked it back.
Also note that WotC couldn't copy things under the OGL 1.0a in the same way at all, even if they weren't marked PI. Why you ask? Because the PI clause bit only matters where something that might be considered OGC is also PI. WotC could only ever have copied stuff that was OGC and not PI. Which was never a significant amount of the 3PPs, it's just the mechanics, in general.
But the actual impact? If I'm wrong and WOTC starts copying and pasting text verbatim, shutting down product left and right? Then I'll change my mind.
Maaaan, come on.
Please, I'm
begging you, keep up to date if you're going to post about this! Weren't you the guy who didn't even know they'd dropped the royalties until yesterday?
Guess what the other thing they dropped at the same time as? That ENTIRE CLAUSE that you're saying is "fine". The dropped it. They promised it won't come back! We already beat them on that! If does come back, the firestorm will reignite on it because they specifically said it wouldn't!
Your post is from minutes ago. WotC dropped that stuff 2 days ago.
*Even the royalties thing they dropped didn't make a lot of sense from a financial perspective, it seems like the overhead costs WOTC could have incurred would have outweighed the income, especially considering that the big producers had a much lower rate.
100% agree.
But why did they ever include it? It was perverse and insulting. But they did include it, and indeed in the OGL 2.0, they only dropped it to 20% (for everyone, not just KS), before finally dropping it entirely in the Friday letter. The fact they're doing actively dumb stuff like that is why people are so upset with them.
On the corporate evil scales, what is being proposed barely registers. I think, even if the revocation of 1.0a is enforceable, the OGL 2.0 would have effectively zero impact on anyone.
This is absolutely this:
The only reason it "barely registers" is because they screwed it up so bad, and the likely end result is just that people will publish stuff that say "For the world's most popular RPG", or "For 5E" or even (according Legal Eagle, this is probably fine - note consult a lawyer before doing though) "Compatible with Dungeons & Dragons", entirely without the OGL (probably with ORC or the like, but they don't even NEED that).
You can't say you're not evil because you got caught before you could murder the wealthy heiress, nor because your gun jammed, or your knife turned out to have been swapped with a fake knife.
And no, it won't "have no effect on anyone". The biggest impact will be that anyone who was publishing under OGL 1.0a, and using OGC, will have to basically go back and re-licence all their books, if they even can, and risks WotC coming after them in court because the legal safe harbour provided is gone.
Now you can say "Hahaha WotC aren't that dumb", but did you just see what happened? WotC are now 150% that dumb.